inside the glass house

Battle of Baghdad — a la Algiers
NEW YORK -- The 1967 cinematic masterpiece the "Battle of Algiers," directed by Italian moviemaker Gillo Potecorvo, skillfully recreates Algeria's war of independence led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against France.

The riveting movie, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film that year, is still considered an impeccable blueprint for urban guerrilla warfare against iron-fisted colonialism. In one of the memorable scenes in the movie, a leader of the insurgency Ben M'Hidi, handcuffed and shackled, is brought before a group of highly-partisan French journalists for intense interrogation.

One of the journalists asks M'Hidi: "Don't you think it is a bit cowardly to use women's handbags and baskets to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?" Shrugging his shoulders and adjusting his spectacles, the Algerian insurgent responds with equal bluntness: "And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on unarmed villages on thousand times more innocent victims?"

And then adds the zinger: "Of course, if we had your fighter planes, it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our handbags and baskets."
The "Battle of Algiers," with no news clips and still looking very much an authentic documentary despite its staged sequences, is viewed at two levels.

At one level, it shows the tenacity of a guerrilla movement to fight colonial rule -- and eventually win independence for a country brutally under the iron heel of the French. At another level, it shows the ruthlessness with which an insurgency was suppressed, mostly by torture and extreme savagery.

The movie, which was an indictment of French colonial rule in Algeria, was banned in France for many years.
In 1971, the French army General Massu, on whom the movie character Colonel Mathieu was modelled, wrote a book challenging the "Battle of Algiers." In the book, he went on to defend the use of torture as "a cruel necessity."

Last year, the Pentagon held a series of screenings of the movie for US army officers before their departure to Iraq. The movie was also considered "required viewing" and a "teaching tool" for US soldiers fighting the insurgency in Iraq.

In a Washington Post article titled "In Iraq, an Echo of Algiers" published last week, the conservative right-wing columnist George Will wrote: "Still, a nagging question is whether, in Iraq as in Algeria, time is on the side of the insurgents."

And he went on: "In Algeria, French counter-insurgency measures were skillful, ruthless and, by late 1958, successful. Briefly. In 1962, France retreated from Algeria."
The Algerian war of independence is clearly beginning to echo in Iraq where US forces are fighting a losing battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.

With a dramatic increase in insurgent attacks over the last two weeks, the US seems bogged down in a war reminiscent of the Algerian insurrection.
Asked whether the US was losing the conflict in Iraq, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was his usual self, avoiding a direct answer: "The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis," he said at a Pentagon briefing last week.

A logical question is: Wasn't that goal a part of the mandate of the American and coalition forces in Iraq: a safer and more democratic Iraq, free of insurgents?
Last week, the US State Department also departed from its usual custom of listing the number of serious international terrorist incidents in its annual report for 2005. The report was released without the statistics.

The reason: the number of terrorist incidents apparently tripled last year, mostly due to rising violence in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the story about the non-transparent figures hit the newspapers, the National Counter Terrorism Centre decided to do the dirty work for the State Department.

Releasing the figures, the Centre admitted a sharp surge in "significant terrorist" acts worldwide: from 175 incidents that killed about 625 in 2003 to 651 such attacks that killed 1,907 in 2004.
"Last year was bad. But this year is going to be worse," Larry Johnson, a former senior State Department counter terrorism official, was quoted as saying.

"They are deliberately trying to withhold data because it shows that, as far as the war on terrorism internationally, we're losing," he added.
Considering the fact that the Iraq conflict alone is costing American tax payers a whopping $200 billion-- not to mention the thousands of Iraqis and American and coalition soldiers dying in an illegal war-- it will be a monumental military misadventure if the US would eventually concede defeat and pull out of Iraq leaving it in a worse mess than it was more than two years ago.

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